I believe that Crawley Council sends a lot of its mail out by private company too.  Maybe there would be less pressure to flog off the Royal Mail if the various levels of government just used it more!

Mind you, the argument that the Royal Mail loses money is a bit suspect anyway.  It is not a business – it is a public service, like the buses and trains used to be, so there is a chance that it will cost money to provide it, although a bit of patriotism from various public bodies would see it costing a lot less.  You don’t hear about the need for the NHS, HMRC or the Royal Navy to turn a profit so why should the Royal Mail be any different?

Maybe it could be made more efficient, maybe the cost of postage is low compared to some other countries’ mail systems, but thre is no need to turn it into a corporation.

Also received a reminder for renewing the road tax on the defunct Seat – about which there is still no word from the insurers.  At least that came by the Royal Mail so not all areas of government are hell-bent on undermining it.

The gist of the consultation is that there is a proposal to provide an additional 1064 spaces across the whole region, which overs Kent, Sussex (East & West), Hampshire, Surrey, Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Bucks by 2016.  There are four options for meeting that target: one is to provide all new spaces as close as possible to where travellers currently live/stop, another is to provide all spaces in the general area where travellers currently live. The remaining options are to provide a percentage of new spaces in the general areas where travellers currently live and to spread the remainder (either 50% or 25%) across the region. There are similar targets and options for travelling show people.

The online questionnaire asks amongst other things, whether the overall target of 1064 for the region is the right number, which of the four options is best, and what to do about councils that do not provide information about current and recent encampments.

As they stand, the current proposals would mean either an additional 16, 20, 23 or 33 pitches in Crawley and either an additional 47, 51, 56 or 59 pitches in Horsham.  All four options give Mid Sussex an additional 21 pitches. What I did not see in the documentation was any indication at district level of how many pitches there are right now, but for the whole county there are about 65 unauthorised caravans and about 180 authorised pitches.

The press release about the consultation is here, and the full details are here – including links to several background documents and the online questionnaire.

The first theory is the one the local Tories were proposing in May. The gist of it was that the travellers used to be all over the place, and then the Tories took over the council and their tough line on travellers made them all disappear instantly with the result that there had been no illegal encampments for a year or so.

The second theory was one I heard in mid-May.  The gist of this theory was that when Labour ran the borough council and travellers camped on land belonging to the county council, the Tory-run county council were in no hurry to move them on and were happy for their stays to be extended as the general public don’t appreciate the exact ownership of land and the encampments were reflecting badly on the Labour-run borough council.  There was also a suggestion that as soon as the Tories took over the borough, their colleagues in the county helped to find a place for the most persistant family of travellers in an official site near Burgess Hill.  The overall implication was that the Tories had tried to prolong the problem in Crawley while it damaged Labour’s reputation and then proved that they could have sorted it all out ages ago if there had been the political will.

And then there was the third theory, which was my own point of view.  When I read the original Tory election claims I thought they were laughable.   Had the travellers stopped visiting a year after they took over the council it might have been plausible that their policies were having an effect, but an immediate effect?  That just smelled of coincidence to me.  I felt at the time that they were tempting fate a bit by trying to calim credit for something that just happened.

Apart from anything, the policy of preventing incursions by fortifying land owned by the council was an old one and, by necessity, a long-running one; it takes a long time to do all that work and it costs a lot so the cost (and therefore the work) was spread over several years.  Most of the work was carried out by the previous Labour council, by the time the Tories took over there were far fewer borough-owned bits of land that were accessible.

The other claim, that the council was more lenient when it was Labour-controlled is debatable too.  I remember a meeting with various people including some travellers and a representative from their pressure group where they claimed that Crawley council were more strict than anywhere else and more aggressive in their processing of eviction orders.

Suffice it to say that I just wrote off the Tory claims as standard opportunism and figured that the absence of illegal encampments was down to a combination of the accumulated impact of the long-running strategy of protecting land and pure chance – that the travellers had decided to go somewhere else for a while.

When I heard the second theory I was a bit seduced by it.  It was a conspiracy theory, but one of the more plausible conspiracy theories I have heard.  In the absence of any hard evidence that a particualr family was accommodated in Burgess Hill, or hard-to-get statistics of how many encampments there were on county-owned land and ho long they lasted I still tend towards the cock-up theory rather than the conspiracy theory.

I wish I had told someone all this at the time because then I could say “I told you so”.  As we have seen this summer, the travellers were not absent because this was ‘fortress Crawley’ and they could not find anywhere to stop here: they were absent because they just wanted to be somewhere else.  The problem was not solved either by publicly-quoted policies or by the suspected underhand secret policies, in fact it was not solved at all – it just decided to go away for a bit.

Anyway, I hear through the grapevine that the travellers are camped near Asda at the moment, and I also hear that they are planning to go to Ireland on holiday tomorrow for a couple of months.  When that happens and the Tories claim that they have gone because of some amazing new council tactic just remember – I told you so.

No.  I think they are visiting Spurs supporters who just haven’t got round to going home after seeing Crawley Town beat the Totenham XI 6-nil

I know the location of the application, and although I haven’t properly studied it with these specific plans in mind, as the development control committee would have done, I suspect that our council’s original decision was correct. I know that just because a building is big and can be seen from another house it doesn’t necessarily make it overbearing – there is a difference between unpleasant and unreasonable – but this does seem like an extraordinarily large building. The planning officers tend to be a lot more objective than councillors who are necessarily and rightly swayed by public opinion and if even they found it too much, and were backed up by the PI I reckon they are probably right.

Having said that, I’ll have to contradict the comments by Claire Denham, the executive member for planning, when she says that “Ruth Kelly has not been down to Crawley”. I met her in Crawley earlier this year and Jayne met her here last year, so thats at least twice she has been to the town.

Of course she will not have looked at the site in question. Does anyone seriously expect her to? Isn’t that what she has an entire department of civil servants for? I expect some of Mrs Kelly’s experienced and highly-qualified experts did come down here and then offered her expert advice which she acted on. I also think they probably gave the wrong advice, unfortunately.

The site does desperately need something done to it, instead of having a derelict and decaying office building, occasionally supplemented by travellers encampments, but a 10-storey building with 270 units?

In the past we would get a developer trying their luck with a 10-storey, 270-unit application and then when they get turned down they would come back with maybe an 8-storey, 220-unit application, get rejected, get an appeal rejected and then come back with a 180-unit application which steps from 4 storeys to 6 storeys which is reluctantly approved. The end result is that nobody is totally happy, but a compromise is reached. Are developers now getting a bit more pushy?

The land is actually zoned for employment and would make a much better location for a new fire station than Cheals roundabout…

The new one is so much better than the old one. The old one was just a yard with two rows of large skips. Whenever there was a need to move skips about or use a JCB to do anything the place was closed, or cars had to squeeze into a side area while the heavy plant was moving around. All for sound safety reasons no doubt, but it always made the lengthy queues even longer.

The new place is a large oval building with a road circling it. The road goes up a ramp leading to a series of hatches at the back. Instead of having to carry rubbish up steps to drop it in a skip you just throw it through the low hatches into the building. The staff can crush, move and scoop up the rubbish using all their bulldozers and everything within the building without holding anything up.

Just to make it even better, the roof of the building extends over the roadway so even if it is pissing down like it was today you don’t need to get soaked while unloading the car or van. Mind you, we were already soaked from loading the car up in the rain, but it is an improvement.

Of course we made sure to find a hatch which had a long drop to bare concrete under it for dumping the old toilet, cistern and sink The whole thing is long overdue, but worth the wait.

I don’t know what is going to happen to the site of the old dump. Is it big enough for a new fire station instead of using the land at Cheal’s roundabout? The new facility is partly built on what was a school playing field (ie free land for the county council) and it frees up valuable space in the industrial site. Moving the fire station frees up valuable land on the leisure park. Couldn’t the proceeds of both bits of land go towards procuring a better site for a new fire station than Cheal’s?

The other thing we noticed on our tip runs was that the travellers are back behind Halfords. Huge earth bunds were put where they usually park, but these bunds were built so that there is still room in front of them for a caravan or two, so they don’t seem to be a very successful design… maybe the old amenity tip should be opened up for caravans? It already reminds me a bit of the traveller’s site in Lewisham with the brick walls around it.

The full results are on the Crawley Borough Council website, but the highlights are:

• Labour lost 3 seats
• Tories gained 3 seats
• Tories gained control of the council
• BNP finished 4th in two wards and 3rd in two wards, with a total of over 1200 votes in total.

One of the Tory gains was by a mere 21 votes in a ward where the postal votes had been screwed up and had to be re-issued. I do not know if that result will be challenged, I guess its up to the agent or the local party or the candidate or someone. Not me anyway. If I was in that position I would be putting in a petition. The other ward affected by the postal votes mess was lost by 200 votes. Probably beyond challenge,

Another Tory gain was in a ward where the Labour/Tory votes were a dead heat, so control of the council was effectively decided by the drawing of lots. A cruel way to do it, but unavoidable in the circumstances. Given the track record of the reluctance of a small minority of voters to vote for foreign-sounding names, we would have held that seat if we had not fielded an Asian candidate but I am glad that principle guided our selection rather than pure electoral considerations.

Labour failed to re-take Broadfield South. There was a problem with a major power outage in the area on election day, but no way of knowing if that affected the turnout or the vote, or how it might have affected the vote. The Tories won by 112 votes, which could easily have been accounted for by a masterpiece of blatant lying and scaremongering a week before election day. Unfortunately that is probably not grounds to challenge the result, but it is not something we will forget. Elections in Crawley have been fought pretty fairly by all parties in the past, and I hope in the future too. There were also some voters who claimed to have not received polling cards and postal votes, but no way of telling how widespread that was.

Obviously there was a large increase in the Tory vote generally, and that cannot be denied, but I do have some doubts about whether it would have been decisive in view of the large increase in our vote in Broadfield South. (Jayne lost with more votes than the Tories won it with in 2004)

Over in Pound Hill South I had a very poor result personally. I know we were not expected to win, and I had no particular desire to re-join the council, but I would have liked to have lost with something between 400 and 500 votes, so I am belatedly disappointed – I only found out my result on Saturday as we left the count before that point to get home and take advantage of having electricity at last. I still can’t see why the counting took so long. There was a dedicated team or counters for each ward, but it seemed like they were only counting one at a time.

At the end of the day, we lost a couple of good councillors, and control of the council. I do not expect to see immediate signs of change though. I do not expect to see the travellers visiting the town less often or being moved on any faster, I do not expect to see a new hospital magically appear, in fact I do not really expect to see any improvement. The real changes will come next year, when the budget is set and the Tories start selling the family silver, but the tangible effects of that will not be felt for a long time.

The result will help a few of our remaining Labour councillors though – the ones who have spent the last 6 years criticising as a matter of course everything the executive has done. At least if they continue in this habit it will be to the benefit of our party and not the other lot and they will be able to vote against the executive following the party whip instead of against it.

It will be interesting to see if the Tories can manage their 1-seat majority better than we managed our 1-seat majority. I suspect they will. What they lack in policy they make up for in discipline, as they proved during the election. Unlike during the election they have to manage the council without the help of coachloads of helpers from Horsham, Surrey and Mid-Sussex, but I think they will manage to hold together their majority.

The thing is that I am positively calm and collected compared to Jayne who is fuming.

Anyway, this document is the latest kindergarten letraset newsletter from our local Tory councillors. Normally I am not too bothered by what they say, and would actively encourage Alan Quirk to write more as his tenuous grasp of reality means that we probably pick up more votes from him talking to people than from us talking to people.

I have always turned a blind eye to the way they take the achievements and plans of the Labour party and claim them as their own thanks to the miracle of cut & paste – the Town Centre North project, the university plans, and the new surgery in Broadfield (plans for which were doing the rounds in 2003/4 before we ever had a Tory councillor in the area)

I have never even bothered to ask them how they intend to “increase investment in grass-cutting, street cleaning and litter collection” (which is already happening), “increase the resources available to the Community Wardens” (who Labour introduced to the town) and “provide high quality services” while “keeping the council tax rises to the rate of inflation or lower”. I can do sums, I spent some time doing management accounts, and the only way to increase expenditure in some areas while reducing income is to either cut other services drastically or to piss away the council’s reserves. But you have to expect such wild claims in electoral literature.

I even ignored, though it was difficult, the way they claimed to have saved the health centre, when it was never in any danger, as the lie was so low-key it was hardly noticeable.

What I really cannot ignore is the latest newsletter, in which they have decided to lie much more blatantly, prominently, and sinisterly. I first heard about it last night from someone who wrote and asked if it was true that there was a travellers’ site planned for Tollgate Hill. I did not pay much attention, knowing full well that there are no such plans, until I got a reply saying that “the latest info I have is from a Conservative newsletter – I normally bin political newsletters but this one caught my eye.”

My first thought was that they really must be desperate and worried if they will resort to such tactics, and put it down to relatively harmless scaremongering, but I remembered that this is not unprecedented. A similar tactic was used in Furnace Green in 2004, and look what happened there (a leaflet was left on cars with a picture of a traveller saying something like “I want to live here, vote Labour so I can come and stay”. Unfortunately I did not see it myself, but it sounded a lot like those infamous leaflets from the 60s. You know the ones.)

It is a not-so subtle twist on the idea of inventing a past potential problem and saying you prevented it like they do with the Health Centre – invent a threat and then say you are against it.

The reason I am so angry is that I know I, Jayne and the rest of the Broadfield party are not prepared to sink that low, so we cannot compete on that level. A shame. It would be so easy to just say, for example, that the Tories intend to withdraw all bus services from Broadfield but we will fight to save them – except even that does not tug at the same emotional strings as the traveller issue. Having travellers live nearby is something people fear. Losing a bus service is something they would dislike but not on an emotional level. Very clever, in a despicable way.

For the record, a council committee, one without decision-making powers, was looking at potential sites for travellers and three or four years ago it looked at the Pease Pottage site but rejected it. The kennels site was also looked at, which is within the boundaries of Broadfield but on the other side of a hill and across four lanes of dual carriageway, and was also rejected. On top of everything, the vice-chair of the committee was a Conservative and apparently quite committed to investigating suitable sites. Whichever way you look at it, and putting aside the question of whether the town should, or should not have a travellers’ site, that does not represent a plan or an intention by the council to locate one in Broadfield.

In fact, as the only two spare parcels of land within Broadfield have now been identified and rejected it is the exact opposite. What makes the whole thing even more despicable is the ever-so-slightly racist undertones of the suggestion. And this is from a councillor who, I was told, only escaped having formal complaints against him for making racist comments by the skin of his teeth. (He was making broad hints about there being too many foreigners without knowing that the white lady he was talking to was a muslim convert who had married into an immigrant family.)

I sat on that because I only heard the comment second-hand from the lady in question, and felt sure he would repeat such rubbish in front of me one day.

The biggest laugh? The last claim on the Tories’ glossy election addresses is “A fresh new council and everyone’s invited!”. Well. Unless they are travellers obviously, and preferably not too foreign. Or teenagers. They don’t seem too keen on having them hanging around either.

Anyway, Jayne had a phone call from someone today asking if these ‘allegations’ were true, saying he had talked with his neighbours and if it was true they were all going to vote Conservative. Who said ‘cheats never prosper’ eh?

These are just my initial thoughts. When I get hold of the newsletter, which they neglected to post through our door for some reason, I will probably get really wound up. One thing though: I am really looking forward to knocking on doors this weekend…

Even allowing for the fact that many of the people were only there for Nimby-ish reasons, it makes a change from the usual apathy in the town, and elsewhere.

The whole thing was a lot more civilised than last week’s fiasco (a Town Hall attendant I spoke to a couple of days later hit the nail on the head when he described the behaviour there as ‘boorish’) which might have a lot to do with the way it was chaired. The leader of the council actually has quite a presence and air of leadership about him, much as he tries to mask it with folksyness and the odd malapropism.

I feel bad now that when I first joined the council and the Labour group was selecting a new leader I voted for someone else. In retrospect he has turned out a lot better than the person I preferred would have done.

As a sign of how civilised it was by comparison, this week one of the travellers felt able to get up and speak. Last week they felt too intimidated.

I was not going to go to the meeting, but I was watching the local news on TV and they went live to the K2 leisure centre to interview Chris Redmayne, and seeing that nothing else was on – Lost having finished now – I decided to pop down. I suspected that traffic would be nasty, so I walked and it turned out to be a wise decision.

I took the shortcut from our estate to the A23 and walked down there. Its a strange route because the footpath is on the Broadfield side of the road and halfway down the hill it just stops and continues on the other side so you have to cross a busy dual carriageway with no lights or any other sort of assistance.

This did give me the opportunity to see the most ironic sight of the day. The crowds of people from Pound Hill and elsewhere who drove to K2 so they could protest about travellers and their antisocial behaviour had already filled up the car park at K2 and had started parking on the verge of the A23 – including blocking the access for the few properties on that road, causing more trouble for those houses than when they had travellers camping in nearby Tilgate Park last year.

I was impressed by the main hall at the new leisure centre though. It had been laid out for at least 1200 seats and there was room for more. I do hope this means we will be getting some larger scale bands playing in town in the future. As long as everyone doesn’t drive there again, obviously.

Interestingly, although the turnout of backbenchers was not bad for an executive meeting, not a single one of the ‘independent’ councillors were there. After breaking the whip on a group decision to defeat their own party, none of them was interested enough in the issue to go to the meeting which resulted from their actions… I’m sure we haven’t heard the last of this. When I put on my vice-chair-of-the-constituency hat I can’t help really hoping that the chair turns up for the next meeting of the constituency so I can sit at the back. Near the door.

One last photo, just because I like it. Its Crawley’s most photogenic bloke, Chris Mullins. When he was mayor he must have had about 6 photos a week in the local press. Every week. It was a running joke that he could hear a photographer unscrewing his lens cap from half a mile away.

One session which particularly interested me was on Local distinctiveness as an economic driver, presented by a chap from Chester City Council.

It struck a chord with me because although its hard to define exactly what ‘local distinctiveness’ means I knew that Crawley doesn’t have it. Much of the town is indistinguishable from any number of other towns, and the newer the part of town the less distinctive it is – all those catalogue developments using the same house designs as everywhere else.

I can remember thinking at the time how great it would be to have something which would make the place feel different and unique, some little feature repeated across the town which would give it a spark of identity.

Today I was taking some rubbish to the tip and realised that we are starting to get it – concrete blocks and grassed ‘bunds’. Nearly every spare piece of land has ugly concrete blocks around it to keep travellers out. Lately there has been some attempt to replace these concrete blocks with piles of earth looking like bronze age ramparts. Now that these are getting grass established on them they are looking quite pleasant, believe it or not.

Or maybe they are seem that way in comparison to the concrete blocks? It must be costing a fair bit, but its a one-off cost compared to the ongoing rental of concrete blocks, and the travellers have showed that they are well equipped to move the blocks out of the way.

Not sure its much of an economic driver though, and I’m sure the bunds are appearing, or will appear, elsewhere in the country so maybe they are not so distinctive either, but its a better symbol of the the town than abandoned shopping trolleys.

I can’t help wondering where all the earth is coming from… must be a bloody great hole somewhere.